Friedman is a real-deal soul stompstress…a versatile and innovative song stylist… a great actor and novelist combined, nuanced, deeply layered, complex as hell and funny, too.” - LA Weekly

"Every song is like an enchanting, thrilling, dark, rousing mini movie. It’s a knockout.” - Willamette Week

Singer-songwriter Ruby Friedman says of her new Label 51 Recordings album Chimes After Midnight, “I’m giving voice to remarkable people who time will erase otherwise, ordinary men and women who changed history. Like chimes after midnight, theirs are the voices you would not hear — people in the dark.”

The Portland-based Ruby Friedman Orchestra's album comprises 10 new compositions penned or co-authored by the pyrotechnic-voiced Friedman. Most of the tracks were co-produced and arranged by Friedman and multi-instrumentalist Ben Landsverk, the co-writer of “Honeystomach (The Flight of Connie Converse),” “Flower Whore,” and “When the Hangman.” Connie and Graham Yost (creator of the hit shows Slow Horses, Silo, and Justified) are co-executive producers of the album.

Co-writers also include Nashville-based musicians Adrienne Smith and Philip White (“Music Row”), California-based DJ/producer Kr3ature (“From the Storm”), and Nicholas Allan Johns, who is a member of Friedman’s Los Angeles band (“Four Day Muse”). Friedman is supported on the record by top players from L.A, Portland, Nashville, New York, Rome, and Athens. The album was mixed and mastered by Steve Baughman in L.A.

Chimes After Midnight is the successor to Friedman’s highly regarded 2016 album Gem, which was praised in Magnet by veteran critic j. poet for its “quiet songs of devastation.” In the interim, she has released the tartly funny single “Ain’t Got Your Money” (featured on the Disney + series The Mighty Ducks); the stormy Los Angeles radio hit “Un4Given”; and the Mitchell Froom-produced “Teardrop Trailer,” originally written for Wynonna Judd. In 2022, she performed “Fire Down Below” on the trailer for the concluding season of the hit Netflix series Peaky Blinders.

She says of her new recording, “If there’s a thread on this album, there are a lot of tales about women — invisible women, or women made invisible who were trying to be seen and heard, or women kept in the dark, or exploited women.” Reflecting the musician’s longtime absorption in history, several of the compositions recount true stories that have boldly contemporary resonances.

The collection leads off with “Honeystomach,” a Philip K. Dick-like imagining of the possible fate of Connie Converse, the ‘50s singer-songwriter whose prescient work went largely unacknowledged before her mysterious disappearance in 1974. Friedman says her interest in Converse dovetails with her admiration for such comparatively unsung musical figures as 1920s-‘30s jazz and blues vocalist Lee Morse (subject of a song on Gem) and ‘60s folk artist Karen Dalton.

"There’s always going to be another female artist to write about because so very few female artists break through, period,” she says.

Another historical piece, “Music Row,” is a story about the 19th century that reverberates in the 2020s. Friedman says, “It’s about the sex workers of the Civil War in Nashville, which was the first city to legalize prostitution so that it could be regulated, for the benefit of the local military. They used the girls in bio-warfare as well — the girls who had sexually transmitted diseases were sent on a riverboat, the Idahoe, to Louisville. And then they came back to what we now call Music Row.”

“The Book Woman’s Daughter” is a fact-based song which was commissioned, like its precursor “The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek,” by writer and Ruby Friedman Orchestra fan Kim Michele Richardson for the video trailers for her like-titled New York Times fiction bestsellers. Friedman explains, “Kim’s books are about the Pack Horse Librarians, women who brought books into remote and sometimes hazardous parts of the Appalachians on horseback.”

The journeys of these historic women are complemented on Chimes After Midnight by songs about the challenges faced by contemporary women, and by Friedman herself. “Most of the songs are either about other females, or they’re me,” she says.

The emotionally charged tracks include the virtuosically sung “From the Storm,” which Friedman describes as “a dystopian love song”; “Flower Whore,” a melding of observation and autobiography about “opium, flowers, money, and sex work”; “Four Day Muse,” a tender ballad of unfulfilled attraction; “Friday Night Depression,” about the struggle for sobriety; the complexly crafted “When the Hangman,” a narrative triptych in which “the women are sabotaged, done in from the inside”; and “Milky Way (Ode to Frank Black),” which confronts the indignities of the music business and voices gratitude for the integrity of courageous artists.

Chimes After Midnight concludes with “The Mayor of North Hollywood Park,” a powerful requiem framed as a New Orleans street funeral for one of Friedman’s good friends, the scion of a prominent Los Angeles music family.

“He was a person in my life, a hero, who succumbed to drug addiction and alcoholism and homelessness,” she recalls. “The end of the song is true. After the funeral, a bird came in an open door while I was writing the song and sat on a chair. He was looking at me, and he gave me that third verse.”